Category Archives: hair color

As I noted in my comments on the previous post, I contacted Ulta Corporate about the whole incident. I got an email in return the next day saying my complaint had been forwarded to the local salon. Another day and I get a call from the local Ulta Salon’s manager, asking me for pictures of my hair. I told corporate and her that I’d spent more than $100 on getting my hair colored in advance, and that the stylist at Ulta had ruined my hair.

So I sent the salon manager the inspiration picture and my hair when completed (previous post), and told her where I thought the burnt section was. She said she’d get back to me after she got the pictures (and after I explained that no I didn’t go somewhere else to get my hair fixed after the incident, that I’d spent money PRIOR to going to Ulta–that they ruined) and let me know what they could do. She said corporate had told her that I went and got my hair fixed AFTER the Ulta fiasco, but I forwarded her the communication from Ulta showing what I’d said. WTF.

The salon manager calls me back and says they’ll refund me the money for my updo, but that’s it (I had given the stylist a cash tip, so that was GONE because I had no proof of that). I said fine, go ahead and refund my credit card.

NO, I had to go into Ulta so she could print something out from the salon that I would then take to the front to have refunded. She told me to come in the following day (this was yesterday) at 3pm, when she would be on duty. And she said I had to go back to the salon area to meet her, I couldn’t just go up front to the registers.

WTF.

So I go to the store today at 3pm, and I look back toward the salon and guess who’s working? Yeah, the guy who ruined my hair. Why would the manager ask me to come in when she knew he’d be working? When she knew it would be uncomfortable for her customer? Because she doesn’t give a shit about her customers. Just like the stylist on Sunday, this was never about customer service or the customer’s good experience, it was about them and their issues. I steel myself and walk back to the salon area and as I’m approaching a woman comes forward. I ask for the manager by name and she says it’s her. I give her my name and she tells me to sit and wait…despite the fact that she’d been doing NOTHING when I arrived. She stood around and asked about someone working on the floor, then came back and told me to follow her to a private office in the back of the store. I have no clue why…but I figured maybe she’s going to apologize? To say SOMETHING customer service related?

Nope.

She tells me to sit in the other chair in the room, then says, “I want to see your burnt hair.”

She’s already said she’s going to give me my money back, so WHAT-THE-EVER-LOVING-FUCK?! My hair was up in a clip, so I pull it down and tell her it’s the under-layer as far as I can tell. She looks through my hair, rolls her chair back and tells the woman who just appeared, “You can take her up front and use her receipt to give her a refund.” Then she says to me, “YOU DID BRING YOUR RECEIPT, DIDN’T YOU?”

Despite her not having told me to bring a receipt prior, I did in fact bring my receipt. I whip out the receipt and she argues over the fact that the receipt says $38.25 (we had a coupon) and I had said $40. In fact, I had said $50 because I had included the tip, but like I said the tip was loooooong gone because it was cash. But she’s arguing over the fact that I said $40 when it was in fact $38.25…WHO IS THIS PERSON?!

I’m dismissed with the staffer, who takes me back past the stupid stylist again, and we go up front. She takes me right to a register, asks me if I have my credit card, then realizes the system will just credit the card automatically. *sigh* Then she asks me to sign and then says, “I’m sorry for the issue you had.”

I said thanks and left the store.

Who are these people? I mean, what kind of customer service is this? Hub told me not to bother to get my money back, but they need to be held accountable. It’s not right that they should get away with things like this. People trust them, they should pay attention to their customers. And if no one calls them on their shit…

Makes me so mad that I paid for the above mess ($50 with tip). And see how in the above picture the side is sort of softly swooped away from the face in sections? I got none of that. He just pulled my hair back in a flat comb-back (don’t have a good picture of that part). And I got no soft curls, no romantic fall of hair…I got a bird’s nest. I wanted it up off my back because my dress had a kind of low back and I wanted it to show, but I didn’t get that either. And for the record, I told him all of this…and showed him the damn picture.

I know, I should have said something, but I couldn’t see ANY of my hair until we were done (he had me facing away from the mirror)…and by then we were already running so late that when we got home, I had thirty minutes to dress and do my make-up. I couldn’t stop to have him re-do, and I honestly was so freaking exhausted at that point that I didn’t care. But the more I think about it the angrier I get. I spent my time and energy not only finding someplace to go with my SIL and nephew’s girlfriend, but then I spent my waning energy by going there and having my hair done.

We had appointments for two of us at 1pm and the third person at 2pm. When they called to confirm on Saturday, they only had the first two appointments, and my appointment at 2pm was suspiciously canceled (they couldn’t figure out why or how it got canceled). The person on the phone re-added me, said they had plenty of time for me in the schedule, and that all was well. When we arrived at Ulta at 12:45, they had two stylists on duty and one of them was knee-deep in a wedding updo and makeup job. So they started with the SIL (who had to leave earlier than we did), and when the other stylist freed up (over an hour late), he started on my hair. He saw my inspiration picture, asked to see it again after a few minutes, then seemed to just go and do whatever he wanted. I suspect he has ONE style, that he then either puts UP or leaves half down, because I watched him do basically the same thing he did to me to the other person in my party, but he put her hair up instead of “curly”. HER hair looked pretty good, my SIL’s hair (done by the first stylist) was nice enough. I got a mess of a blobbly, sloppy pony tail with my hair wrapped around the base of it. WTF.

I kind of just want to go somewhere else with the pretty inspiration picture and ask them to do my damn hair so I can enjoy it. Boo.

I guess on the positive side, I had a lot of people compliment my dress and how I looked. I don’t handle compliments very well, so I felt awkward every time someone said something, but oh well. Amusingly enough, my SIL said she had picked out the same exact dress for her daughter’s wedding several years ago, but ended up wearing one of the other options she’d bought.

I’m in a bad mood. I shouldn’t post this blog but I’m gonna anyway. I wrote a review about the Ulta salon on Yelp, because I feel like the stylist just didn’t give a shit about what I wanted and people should know that.

I had a whole list of things I needed to do today, but other than PT this morning and packing up some purses to go back to Amazon (I ordered a “sampling” to go with my dress and kept one), I did none of it. Bleh.

Bleh bleh bleh.

Oh lordie I think he burnt my hair. I thought it was the smell of the product he used in my hair, but I have just washed and conditioned my hair and it STILL smells bad/burnt. OMG what the hell did he do??

I had my appointment with the psychic medium yesterday, but this post is not about that. I will post about it, but I can’t handle it right now.

This past week I had my hair color-fixed at the salon, and I ended up doing a purple-wine color, with blue underneath the major fall of my hair. It’s a little hard to see the blue because I’m wearing a blue shirt. You said “duh” but I honestly wore it in case I had any blue dye drippage, I figured you wouldn’t notice on the shirt. (the hair stylist took this photo outside of the salon)

And this is the photo I took indoors a few hours later. Sorry, I still have a thing about privacy and I couldn’t get pictures of the back of my head because my shoulder doesn’t cooperate these days.

I was surprised at how nice my hair looked considering how shitty the texture was prior to the dye-job. I asked her not to trim the “crispy” ends because I’m getting an updo for the wedding and I wanted the extra length for that. As it turns out–so far–the ends were far from crispy after I was dyed and washed. She said the demi-colors that she used were conditioning (and so is the blue, which isn’t demi), so here’s hoping. At present, I’m sitting here with a treatment on my hair prior to the first wash after the dye-job. I hope my hair isn’t in horrible shape after the wash in another half an hour.

Anyway, I like the colors, I’m just feeling a little shell-shocked at how I look with dark hair again. I’ve been living with the washed-out hair for so long that the dark color is DARK. It also drives me kinda crazy that I can’t ever make my hair look like it looks walking out of the salon. I know that’s a very common complaint for women, but shit…look at that hair on the first picture. It looks so soft and bouncy and shiny and lovely. It’s a trick, people! Stylists are witches…I’m telling you. They have some kind of voodoo magic, that’s why none of us can ever replicate it.

So yesterday, the appointment with the psychic. Last evening, I was tired. I slept really crappy last night, woke up at 6am to my father’s barking dog outside…and I never got back to sleep. I’ve been feeling crappy all day today. I basically sat in my recliner all day and tried to do nothing. My face and my head and everything felt swollen and stuffy. I don’t know how else to explain it. Like when you go through a pressure change? And then later, as the day wore on, I started feeling off-balance and that terrible exhaustion creeping up on me. When I got up to eat dinner with Hub, I really felt tired and off-balance and nauseated and I had trouble walking. I was upset after dinner because I knew I had to rinse my hair and then put the treatment on…and then wash the treatment from my hair.

And I’m worried about tomorrow. I’m supposed to go with my SIL and my nephew’s girlfriend to get updo’s done for the wedding. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. I’m not even sure how well I’m going to make it through the wedding. I feel so shitty…the wedding is supposed to be like five hours long… I’ll try to do nothing in the morning in the hopes I can make it to the salon and then to the wedding. I had hoped to do my nails tonight, but that’s out. Sucks more than I expected because I think my fingernails are a bit tinted blue from putting the treatment into my blue hair. I hope when I go to wash my hair that the blue tint won’t get worse. I’ll be at the wedding with blue-tinged hands…yay. Maybe I shouldn’t have waited until today to wash my hair for the first time since getting it dyed, but I was trying to keep the color fresh. Oh well…

The worst part is how bad I feel physically. Is it because of the emotions that came up yesterday with the psychic? Is it the wedding tomorrow we’ll be celebrating without Mom? Is it having family in town (and staying with us) without Mom? Or is it my physical health is just shitty? Did I eat something wrong? Is it a combination of all of the above?

Well, I hope when I get my hair done tomorrow I can get a picture of it. I wanted to have the blue peek through a little with the updo just for fun. We’ll see how it comes out. And hopefully I make it through at least the ceremony and the dinner. I’ll call it a success if I can do that…anything more than that will be gravy.

I have so much to write about and absolutely no interest in writing any of it.

sigh

What I’m hyper-focused on right now is my poor hair. Guys, I went to an Aveda salon and spent a shit-ton of money. SHIT-TON. Like yeah. Like WTF was I thinking shit-ton of money. It’s now about four weeks out from the coloring and I’m pretty disappointed on a couple of fronts. The main thing that upsets me is that my hair feels bad. Not emotionally, but physically. I’ve never had such crappy feeling wet hair in my LIFE. It feels like brillo when it’s wet, and I can’t hardly comb through it after I wash and condition. I’ve had my hair colored before by salons…I’ve box-dyed my hair. I’ve never had my hair feel like this before. WTF. It’s frizzy as hell when it’s dry–which isn’t incredibly unusual for me–but it’s also DRY. Like so dry it makes me sad. None of my fancy shampoos and conditioners are working. Argan oil didn’t help. Coconut oil hair mask didn’t help. Aloe vera mask didn’t help. Tomorrow I’m going to Ulta to try to find another type of shampoo and conditioner. I’m pissed at how much money I’ve spent on hair care to try to repair whatever the frufru was done to my poor follicles.

I particularly picked the Aveda salon because it was supposed to be gentle, plant-based, organic, safer hair color. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the stylist, but I’m disappointed in the results.

I’m also disappointed in the color retention. My hair is basically orange (which Hub lovingly tells me it’s “copper”), red, and then sort of white-ish-gray-ish-green-ish (from the washed out blues). There’s some red leftover on the upper areas which started out purple but mostly just washed out to reddish. Then there’s kind of the original brown with tinges of dark auburn where the darkest of purple was.

I’ve spent hours since the first post-color week passed looking over instagram posts while trying not to be jealous. At this point, I’ve begun to understand that those instagram posts are kind of manipulated to look the way they do. I mean, when they took my pictures, they made me go outside to get good light. The stylist posted a VERY photoshopped (filtered?) version of one of the pictures on her instagram (which I think looked pretty crappy) instead of using one of the ones you saw on my previous post. Inside the salon, the colors were different…and after a week they were totally different. I mean, I knew the colors would wash out somewhat, but I think because we started with lighter colors (not my choice…I wanted jewel toned purples and blues) they washed out to almost nothing really fast. All the bright color that was hidden underneath is gone, too.

I’m not sure I have a good concept of how bad my hair color really looks. I want to go somewhere to get it “fixed” but I feel like it’s in shitty condition and I don’t want to make it worse. I mean, I know I sound dramatic and all, and honestly I’m sort of just complaining because in the grand scheme it’s HAIR and it’s really fine and I just mostly put it up and no one pays attention anyway… I’m just disappointed. You guys would be horrified to know how much I spent for hair color that barely lasted a week (and I only washed my hair twice in that week to try to maintain the color). I’m honestly horrified at what I spent. I feel like if I spent that much and my hair feels this shitty damage-wise, what will happen if I go to a less expensive place to get it “color corrected”??

Enjoy my updated photos. I’m ONLY doing this because I wish I had seen updated photos on instagram. 😦 Then maybe I would have gone into this with full knowledge of what would be…

Remember the glory of what was?

Bleh.

February has just been…shitty. I’ve used that word a lot in this post, haven’t I? I’ll have to write more posts, because I’ve been exhausted and sick and had an urgent care + ER visit and doctor’s visit x2 and a big anxiety attack and a persistently puking dog and running to the vet and… and yeah, I’ve been in a lot of physical pain to cap it all off. Plus my new glasses gave me a migraine with visual aura–which I’ve only had once in my life and it was 10 years ago. So I sent them back and picked up the “fixed” version on Friday and they’re STILL not right. Ugh.

So here’s the thing. I went into the salon and said, “no yellow and no orange” and had given them an “inspiration” photo which I think they must have misplaced. But truthfully, I told the stylist to do what she thought would look awesome, but that I wanted purple and blue to be the base colors.

I got some purple (in some lights) but not as much blue as I wanted. Beyond that, the stylist really went gung ho on my hair. Other stylists kept stopping to watch, and one who went home before we were done made my stylist promise to get pictures and put them on instagram. Ya’ll are gonna see more of me than you ever have (don’t be dirty!) in this here post.

So for comparison, here’s my hair under normal recent circumstances.

I had some color done last January and that shit just hung on for dear life. It really didn’t look too bad, but you can see it was growing out. It was red, so the stylist was worried about some warm orange tones sticking around even after the “lift” procedure.

Step one…I call this “Foil and Plastic Nightmare”

It was hot as shit under those plastic sheets and those foils. And then THIS nightmare happened…

I had no idea this is what would happen. I seriously sent this to Hub while I was in the chair saying, “Who am I and what am I doing here?” His response was “uh, okay…” I walked into the salon at 9am. By the time they’d washed and toned and washed this mess, it was about noon. My ass hurt so bad from sitting in that chair, I can’t even…

Then I got the goods… (I wish I had taken pictures of the colors in the bowls, but alas, I did not.) This was about the time other stylists started stopping by the chair to watch the painting. Every now and then one of them would walk by and go “oh yeah!” or “so cool!” or whathaveyou. It was weird.

That’s some shit going on there. At this point, my butt hurt so much I actually got up from the salon chair and was walking around aimlessly. I was pacing around in the front area and a poor woman came out of the salon area to pay and I think I scared her. She jumped and sort of giggled, then ran to the desk to pay. So then I sat on the cushy sofa in the front waiting area while I ate some crackers I had brought along. Shortly thereafter, the stylist came to check on me and we headed back to wash out the colors. Oh, the colors! I got a wash and a special deep conditioning and a scaaaaaaaaalp massage. Then back to the chair. She did a quick trim (I only wanted a trim), showing her assistant how she was handling the cut (which I had thought she was going to do in layers but I don’t think she did).

I wish I had pictures of this, but it was now 1pm and my stylist had another appointment at 1:30. So she pulled in her assistant and the TWO of them started drying my hair at the same time. One yanking one direction, the other yanking the other direction. And as my hair is drying, they both start grinning and pointing at different sections of the hair and I’m like WTF, just show me already! So my stylist laughed and they just kept going. Big round brushs twirling, yanking, hot air. It was quite the show. Then they took a picture with my hair straight.

Brace yo-selves…

That is some kind of sumpthin’ right thar!

I sort of wanted to cry a little. It was so crazy. I’m so not a crazy person. But this was so crazy.

My stylist had to get to her other client, so she left me with her assistant because I didn’t want to leave with straight hair. The assistant went to work with a big barrel curling iron and as she’s curling my hair she’s muttering, “so jealous, dammit. I want this hair so bad.” I told her I was sorry but it was attached to my head. She told me she was going to get the stylist to do it to her because it was so fun. So the curl is done and the assistant drags me out in front of the salon to take pictures for their instagram. Then she took a few shots with my phone.

One more time, Effie…

So there’s that.

Now, for more real-life photos…

One of the neat things? She did a bunch of teal and magenta shit underneath, so when I put my hair up, you can see all the more vibrant colors. Also, depending on the light, my hair looks like different colors (you can kinda see that in the pictures). And lastly, as it fades, I’ll get kind of a new set of colors, which will be interesting. Sorry for all the blobby white bits…you know how I feel about privacy. Although, shit, if you see me on the street at this point you might recognize me from the cray-cray hair. Oh well… LOL

So after all was done, I paid up (holy shit did I pay) and after more compliments from the front desk staff, I went out to my car. I locked myself in, picked up my phone and texted Hub… “You’re going to flip your shit!”

Predictably, because my husband loves me, he told me how amazing my hair looked when I got home. He’s kind of a sweetheart like that.

I think, should I get this touched up in a few months, I’d opt for more blue. I like the blue areas a lot. I really would like more of my hair to look like the underside…but there’s always next time.

Also, I left the salon at 2pm. No joke, from 9am to 2pm. My stylist rocked, and she earned her money for sure.